On Fri, 6 Mar 2020 11:13:28 +0100 Daniel Vetter daniel@ffwll.ch wrote:
On Tue, Mar 03, 2020 at 05:33:32PM +0200, Pekka Paalanen wrote:
On Tue, 3 Mar 2020 15:25:41 +0200 Pekka Paalanen ppaalanen@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, 3 Mar 2020 12:37:16 +0100 Daniel Vetter daniel@ffwll.ch wrote:
On Tue, Mar 3, 2020 at 11:53 AM Brian Starkey brian.starkey@arm.com wrote:
Hi,
On Tue, Mar 03, 2020 at 12:10:29PM +0200, Pekka Paalanen wrote:
On Fri, 21 Feb 2020 10:08:42 +0100 Neil Armstrong narmstrong@baylibre.com wrote:
...
> +/* > + * Amlogic Video Framebuffer Compression modifiers > + * > + * Amlogic uses a proprietary lossless image compression protocol and format > + * for their hardware video codec accelerators, either video decoders or > + * video input encoders. > + * > + * It considerably reduces memory bandwidth while writing and reading > + * frames in memory. > + * Implementation details may be platform and SoC specific, and shared > + * between the producer and the decoder on the same platform.
Hi,
after a lengthy IRC discussion on #dri-devel, this "may be platform and SoC specific" is a problem.
It can be an issue in two ways:
If something in the data acts like a sub-modifier, then advertising support for one modifier does not really tell if the data layout is supported or not.
If you need to know the platform and/or SoC to be able to interpret the data, it means the modifier is ill-defined and cannot be used in inter-machine communication (e.g. Pipewire).
Playing devil's advocate, the comment sounds similar to I915_FORMAT_MOD_{X,Y}_TILED:
- This format is highly platforms specific and not useful for cross-driver
- sharing. It exists since on a given platform it does uniquely identify the
- layout in a simple way for i915-specific userspace.
Yeah which we regret now. We need to now roll out a new set of modifiers for at least some of the differences in these on the modern-ish chips (the old crap is pretty much lost cause anyway).
This was kinda a nasty hack to smooth things over since we have epic amounts of userspace, but it's really not a great idea (and no one else really has epic amounts of existing userspace that uses tiling flags everywhere, this is all new code). -Daniel
Isn't the statement that this for sharing between producer and decoder _on the same platform_ a similar clause with the same effect?
What advantage is there to exposing the gory details? For Arm AFBC it's necessary because IP on the SoC can be (likely to be) from different vendors with different capabilities.
If this is only for talking between Amlogic IP on the same SoC, and those devices support all the same "flavours", I don't see what is gained by making userspace care about internals.
The trouble is if you mix&match IP cores, and one of them supports flavours A, B, C and the other C, D, E. But all you have is a single magic modifier for "whatever the flavour is that soc prefers". So someone gets to stuff this in DT.
Also eventually, maybe, perhaps ARM does grow up into the client/server space with add-on pcie graphics, and at least for client you very often end up with integrated + add-in pcie gpu. At that point you really can't have magic per-soc modifiers anymore.
Hi,
I also heard that Pipewire will copy buffers and modifiers verbatim from one machine to another when streaming across network, assuming that the same modifier means the same thing on all machines.[Citation needed]
If that is something that must not be done with DRM modifiers, then please contact them and document that.
Sorry, it's waypipe, not pipewire: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe/
I do think this is very much something we want to make possible. They might pick a silly modifier (compression modifiers only compress bw, by necessity the lossless ones have to increase storage space so kinda dumb thing to push over the network if you don't add .xz or whatever on top).
I'm also hoping that intel's modifiers are definitely the one and only that we ever screwed up, and we should be getting those fixed in the near future too.
So maybe what we should do instead is add a comment to the modifier docs that this stuff _is_ supposed to be transferrable over networks and work.
Personally I was not sure if it was so. Good to hear it is. Writing it down would be much appreciated.
While at it, could you also write down something about the requirements of memory layout documentation? What I mean is, is it required that the memory layout is publicly specified *somewhere* if not in the modifier doc itself?
It's not necessary for anyone to actually know the memory layout when the use cases only involve hardware access, but if there is no public spec I fear it would be easy to adapt an incompatible layout somewhere and never be able to notice until some rare case of interoperability mysteriously produces garbage.
Thanks, pq